My seed closet

I've re-organized my closet for all the seeds and herbs I used for cooking. With simple stackable plastic boxes, I can see what I have and find what I need very quickly. I like to have this organization, it helps a lot to create new recipes!

Croque-monsieur

I know it's the easiest meal to cook and it requires actually not a single cooking skill, but it's always delicious and simple to accomodate with a lot different side dishes depending on the season.

Why simple? Because in my version of the croque-monsieur I do not use bechamel, I find this heavy and it is totally unecessary when the bread is soft and tasty. So the base for my croque-monsieur is a very good and fresh pain de mie (it works with toasts but it's so much less tasty). I top it with a very little butter, a slice of ham (the quality of the ham also makes a lot: I use always Kamakura ham) and some gratted cheese (gruyere, comte... Anything you like), toast in the oven, and ready to eat! In winter I often serve it with cabbage or cauliflower. This time it was cauliflower and romanesco roughly mashed with a lot of pepper and a bit of nutmeg.

Taisho style

At first when we came to Japan I couldn't get used to these Japanese-Western (wa-yo) style things: buildings, clothes, food... Everything looked like a pale copy of something we have in Europe or there is in the US, but with something wrong. The most significant period of that style is probably the Taisho era (around 1910-1925), after the many trials in the Meiji period, when the style started to be more stable and much established.

It took me some time to really understand this style. Now I think this is my favorite period for Japanese art, architecture, design and clothing and even literature. Strangely, probably one of my favorite period in Western style too!
In terms of food my favorite is probably om-rice (オムライス), even it started in late Meiji. I'll give you my recipe very soon!
There are fewer and fewer examples of Taisho architecture in Tokyo now because of a total lack of consciousness of these jewels (or maybe trying to ignore them for profits) and they are replaced one by one by ugly plastic prehab houses. But in areas such as Taito-ku north of Ueno, Ya-Ne-Sen between Taito-ku and Bunkyo-ku, or in Arakawa-ku around Senju and Kita-Senju it is still possible to see some along with some early Showa buildings. 

Ukiyoe by Yumeji Takehisa
present of the shamisen group

Dentist office in Ueno established in 1900,
and re- built in Showa 3/1928

An other excellent example is the Yasuda mansion near Sendagi (unfortunately rarely open to public) where it is possible to also enjoy interior design and original furnitures. More accessible yet less typical is the Asakura Chosho museum in Yanaka. Other options for a condensed viewing are open air museums where such houses have been moved to. There are two excellent places, the first is Meiji Mura near Nagoya in Inuyama, the other is the Tokyo Oedo Museum of Architecture in Koganei. It has a few exemplars that have been moved there for preservation.

Probably I came to understand and like this period through literature. It is widely covered in the work by Yukio Mishima and by Junichiro Tanizaki, where the mo-ga (modern girl) is well represented and that I massively read after starting to live in Tokyo. Probably "Naomi" is an excellent start. 
The music that I've had the chance to be introduce to by my husband shamisen group of ha-uta has also given an interesting insight about customs and women liberalization at that time.


Regarding graphic arts, I really like ukiyoe from Yumeji Takehisa and Goyo Hashiguchi, and paintings from Kunitaro Suda for example. The museum of modern art in Hayama, besides being ideally located on Hayama beach, hosts many exhibitions during the year of Japanese painters covering that period and each is worth seeing.

But it is only very recently that I came across a fabulous book: Taisho chic, about the aesthetic of Taisho period that summarizes very well the trends at that time (architecture is not covered though) and I really recommend it if you want to understand this period of Japanese history.

Quick starter

Bleached leeks with balsamic vinegar, olive oil and a few sesame seeds- Japanese pepper. Quick, nice and healthy starter.

Chick peas and spinach soup "my way"

After 2 days of cold rain, which is not so common, I needed a sunny and warm dish. Since I just bought Koganei-grown spinach I come up with the idea of chick peas and spinach soup. And the idea went very well for a ready-in-ten-minutes dinner!

I cut roughly the spinach and boiled them in water where I've added a few carvi seeds and veggie consommé. In the mean time I've cooked some couscous with a few sultanas and pine nuts, and a bit of olive oil. When the spinach were soft I've added drained tinned chick peas (yes! Sometimes canned ingredients can be of tremendous help!!). And it's ready!!! The slightly spicy soup goes very well with the slightly sweet semolina, a perfect match!

Tiropita

Greek diner today with a fresh tiropita. Mix feta cheese with 3 eggs and 100g of grated cheese, plus salt, pepper and a few basilic leaves. For a softy tiropita, I add 3 spoons of ricotta (I know, it's not geek at all).

In a mould, superimpose filo sheets with butter, then the mixture and few filo sheets with butter again. 

In the oven bake for 20 minutes.

Curry-rice

One of the easiest Japanese dish to cook is curry-rice (pronunce "karey-rayiss"). I like because it is quick to prepare, and it's a warm dish you can make with whatever you have in the fridge: perfect for a Sunday lunch after spending hours in the cold treaming trees in the garden. You can use only vegetables, meat, fish or mix vegetables with meat or fish. The variety of ingredients has only the limit of your imagination! So once decided what to put inside it is super easy. I always start with an onion or a leek that I cook with a bit of oil (olive or not) or butter. Once almost brown I add carrots, sweet potatoes, potatoes, meat if any... And half cook them. Then I add a spoon of curry spice, the quantity depends on how strong you like your curry, I like mine tasty but not hot.

Then add some grinded black pepper, a bit of Japanese 7 spices (shichimi). Now it's time to prepare the roux. For that add flour and stir well the vegetables. Finally add water. In Japan there are all kinds of curry-rice, some very liquid, some quite compact. This just depends how you like it and how long you cook the roux, anyway, you can add water anytime if you find yours too thick.

In the last few minutes of cooking I sometimes add a few other veggetables tgat need short cooking time: brocoli, cauliflower, green peas... 

Ready to serve with some white Japanese rice (for some reason I find it much better than with briwn rice). Japanese eat that dish with a spoon!

Ratatouille on pancake seeds

Toady I used my famous pancakes seeds (see recipe on a previous post), and I spread a small layer of cashew nut paste (found in biocorner), then 2 spoons of french ratatouille (tomato, onion, eggplant with thyme and olive oil). But it's delicious too with fresh ceps, or pumpkin puree.

Seeds pancake

An easy recipe to make seed pancakes (to eat with vegetables or mash).
I used to make these simple seed pancakes mixing seeds of linen and sunflower (50g of each), add a big onion gilded with 2 spoons of olive oil, and add 2 spoons of soya sauce.
Then make the pancakes (10cm round and 0,5cm thickness), bake for 5-10 minutes. And now you can keep then for few days.

The seeds

The onions

Seeds, onion and soya sauce ready to be bake.

Tada!

Classic ravioli

I love ravioli and in Japan it is not easy to find good ones. So the best option I've found is to make my own.

Using my pasta machine things have become much easier.

For the filling, since my husband doesn't eat cheese I use a traditional filling with porc meat. And for the accompanying sauce a fresh tomato, olive oil and oregano. 

The result was very nice, though I think I still can improve it a little.

Bakewell Tart

An English classic dessert, the bakewell tart, with almond, strawberry marmalade inside and a Royal Icing. And of course a cherry on the top! The recipe is simple (100g of soft butter, 170g of ground almond, 3 eggs, 2 spoons of flour, 100g of sugar. In small molds, put the mixture, half the mold, then a small spoon of marmalade and mixture again. In the oven for 10 minutes. Wait for the cakes to be cold. Make the frosting with 200g of icing sugar and the white of one egg. Put on the top of the cake. Add the cherry!)

Perfect for tea time, not too difficult to make and really impressive if you have guests!

Who are the Tokyo-Paris sisters?

We are two real sisters Prunellia, the eldest and Gentiane (me!).

We're both French and we were raised in the South of France at the foot of Paul Cezanne most famous mountain: the Sainte Victoire. We both like interior design, cooking and fooding and beautiful things,

Prunellia is an architect-interior designer-web designer based in Paris. She has been interested in Japanese architecture and Japanese culture for more than 25 years now and visiting Japan quite often since the early 1990's. 

Gentiane is a roboticist in Tokyo. Being much younger she has been introduced to Japan as a teenager when Prunellia was meeting Japanese students studying in Aix. (I really enjoyed our parties with our Japanese friends Shotaro, Tomoko, Kotomi etc...)

Though being completely different we do share a lot, probably from our upbringings. That's how the idea of a journal four-hand started.

My version of vegetable soup

In winter soup is the best diner. My version of vegetable soup is quite similar as Gentiane's one. But I used the juice of a chicken to brown the leeks, then I add some vegetable of the market: carrot, zucchini, mushroom, Chinese cabbage and some crumbled chicken. And this time bulgur too.
You can sprinkle with a bit of parmigiano cheese.
You'll never be cold.

Another quick dinner fix

An other evening when I needed a quick fix for dinner (to be honest it's almost every day!!), thus a "one plate" and a happy husband!

In these situation quinoa is particularly adequate because you can cook it very quickly, it's full of proteines, so perfect for my almost veggan diet.

I quickly cooked red quinoa, and added a bit of raw avocado, a slice of wild smoke salmon (not mandatory, it can go veggan), some sprout and young leafs, and a few brocoli that were just 2min in steam (you can steam them on top of the quinoa). For seasoning a bit of lemon juice, olive oil (olives from Provence), salt and pepper. Always simple, always delicious. Plates ready to eat in less then 10 min for 2 (the quinoa os basically what takes the longest but you're free handed in the mean time!).

 

Japanese room in Paris

I love Japan, and each time I go there I try to bring back few objects to recreate my own Japan in Paris. For example, for the bedroom, I found tatami used as a carpet in front of the bed, a wallpaper with sakura flowers, old obi found at the flea market in Kyoto then used to make cushion and curtains, and for my small "cabinet de curiosité": geta, peak hair with flowers like the Maiko have... And of course Daruma and Maneki Neko.

And this room style has been choosen by Homify, french blog on decoration.
https://www.homify.fr/livres_idees/15355/choisir-sa-table-de-chevet
(The second picture in the article)

Hot veggie and bean soup for cold evening

Japanese winters are very sunny and dry in Tokyo area. If there is not too much wind day time sun is fairly warm, but as soon as it gets dark the temperature drops and it becomes freezing cold. A hot veggie soup is perfect to warm and rehydrate at the same time.

My classic is a base with 1 leek, 2 big carrots, 2 small potatoes. I diced them and cook them in water with 1 leaf of laurel and a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper.

Then if I want something a little bit more nourishing I add this marvelous Italian mix of lentils, beans and barley that I buy at one of the NYC Eataly shops in Tokyo.

And once all well cooked I serve it with a bit of finely grated parmigiano. Et voila!

  

Flea market in Tokyo

There are several flea market in Tokyo selling pretty much everything, many for refurbish clothing and shoes. But if you're looking for some Japanese old stuff and some antic my two best picks are Monzen Nakacho flea market and Yasukuni shrine flea market. The latter is my top favorite.

It's every Sunday morning in the side alley going to the shrine. The number of people depends highly on the weather, and it might not take place during the special festival of the shrine. Every time I go I find something!!

A few years ago I found this beautiful iron lion head that I've offered to my sister for her Parisian-Japanese interior.

This time I found some bamboo baskets used as flower vase, but I'm thinking of using them as lamp shade for the country house... We'll see...

Macha Madeleines

It's the week-end, time to make cookies, cakes and today: madeleines. I used a french traditional recipe (just eggs, sugar, flour, milk, honey) but with a touch of Japan: macha.
Just ready to eat!

A well deserved tea time

After a short but really intense week at work, and the perspective of working* for the entrance examination this week-end. I treated myself with a good Earl Grey (I really love the Empress Grey from M&S), and a toast (not home-made this time) with butter and my marmalade made last week-end. And I must say that I am very very pleased with the results. It's the third year I make some, and this year is the best: it's not too bitter, not too hard and very tasty. The peels are of good size too.

* I don't if I can say "working" because our job is to dispatch problems and answer shits to the students, stand or seat without doing anything for 80min, collect the answer shits, count them, and repeat that 5 or 6 times in the day... which is not my normal job...

Go organic!

A few months ago my local grocery store in Koganei changed its branding (probably due to some group acquisition). After a few days a lot of the products I was buying vanished from the shelves, replaced by low quality products and I was left with almost nothing decent to shop there. No more delicious organic lemon, no more Italian honey soft candies... I started to shop elsewhere. 

A few weeks ago the shop went under massive renewal, and recently I've been checking in again and realized that they've completely changed their pitch: now half of the products are organic from fresh vegetables to smoke salmon, tea, spices... and they even have a nice selection of familiar imported products of good quality mainly from France and Italy!

It seems that the organic trend is finally making its way in Japan, after years of undergroud unlabelled existence... How good is that going to be?

Special fish dinner

Last night I was invited at one of the university senior professor's place for dinner. It was mainly for business purposes, but it's not so often that Japenese invite you home. After 10 years there, hundreds of dinners at home, I can still count on the fingers the number of houses we've visited as guests!! Most people prefer to invite you at the restaurant.

Last night host's hobby is fishing and he offered us a selection of unique fishes he fished on Tuesday for dinner. Something really delicious and fresh!

The first one was slowly oven grilled sabre fish served with a little of soya sauce and rice. This fish has a very fine white flesh, juicy and it's shape and color make an simple beautiful plate.

The other one, more exceptional is scorpion fish. A quite rare and difficult to catch fish. This very muscly fish has a very firm flesh very similar to the monkfish was served in a shabu-shabu style. Something like a hot-pot where you dip the slices of fish to cook it. 

Everything was home-made and delicious! Thanks for letting me discover these fishes!

Quick dinner fix

It is very often that we come back home quite late from work, starving and tired. In that case I like to prepare what Japanese call a "one plate". It is usually a composition of several unrelated elements all combined in one plate. In some restaurants the one plate can cover from starter to dessert!!! I don't go that far, but it is a nice way to fix rapidly something for dinner. 

This time it was awfully simple: and colorful: baby leaf salad with a bit of olive oil, red cabbage+carrots+linseed (I shredded roughly the cabbage and carrots and because it's winter and cold I wanted something warm to eat I cooked them 5min rather than serving them raw), some fresh delicious "katsu" from Saboten*.

* Saboten (http://www.ghf.co.jp/saboten_rest/) is a shop that sells "katsu" in various forms. They have a lot of veggie: asparagus, potato croquette, edamame, and porc: tonkatsu, hirekatsu... They are made on the spot, ingredients are chosen carefully, menu changes with season and they are always yummy. They have a few antenna shops in town. Since I never fry at home, it is a good option once in a while, and I know some that are always happy with these, but it means leaving work no mater than 21:00, if not there's nothing remaining...

Alternative greengrocery shopping in Tokyo

There is something really amazing in Japan, and I believe it is what we could call "trust" (or may be laziness!). For example in many places you can book without paying in advance (hotels, car rentals...), you can shop and pay later (it may not work everywhere though, and this also happens elsewhere)... Yet there's something like Japan got stucked in the 50's or the 60's. And what I love most it's when it comes to fresh vegetables and fruit shopping!

It is not unusual in the country to see stands by the road with freshly picked fruits and vegetables and no one there. It's not that it is closed... There is a box someplace: you pick-up what pleases you and put the money in the box. The deal is simple: super fresh resources for a super price!

I have the chance to have such a system on my way to the lab, close to Higashi Koganei station in Tokyo. When there are crops on the shelf there is a red flag floating and you just have to help yourself. Depending on the season they have daikon, cabbage, cucumber, potatoes, etc... Usually for 100yen. It's grown on the plot behind, and they use no chemical or whatsoever. It's fresh, natural and local! You just have to be quick to catch something, first in first served! 

Fruits from the garden in various forms

We're lucky to have a garden full of trees and flowers that grow without too many difficulties. Every year at every season there is something to pick in the garden. Last week I just picked the last tangerine, now we have plenty of a sort of grapefruit (a little more sour). This year they are particularly soft and sweet so they are delicious in juices and hot lemonade.
This morning I just picked one for some fresh squeezed juice.

Yet, there are so many of them that marmalade is always a good way to enjoy them all year long.

For the recipe I use a British one of course (from the Guardian) a little modified since the fruits from the garden are not oranges, 1kg of brown sugar, 700g of fruits, 1.25L of water. Depending on how it sets I usually add some apple pips, this time it was not necessary. It made 7 jars. Can't wait to try it with some good home-made bread!

Whole-wheat baguette viennoise

Still running out of regular white flour, I prepared a whole-wheat baguette viennoise for breakfast (regular recipe from Kayser's book). Despite the granulous texture due to the whole-wheat it was perfectly soft and tender. I replaced the yolk egg batter with a whole egg batter and the color and crisp of the shell was much better too.

Spelt baguette

I wanted to make some baguette but realized I was running out of white flour, so I replaced it by spelt flour. The result was really tasty and I managed, despite the cold temperature in the house in that season, to obtain a very soft crumb in a relatively short time.